Wayward Manor

The Odd Gentlemen is the studio that was behind The Misadventures of P.B. Winterbottom. Winterbottom was perhaps not the most extraordinary indie puzzle platformer, but it was fun and had some clever design ideas and, most importantly, was about a dude that really loved pie. Neil Gaiman is the author behind Stardust, one of my favorite fantasy novels, and The Sandman, one of the best comic series of all time according to everyone and their mothers (except for Neil Gaiman’s mom, strangely enough, who had always hoped her son would grow up to be a lawyer). Both of these entities have shown themselves of being very capable in their field in the past is the point I’m trying to get accross. And yet, Wayward Manor is bad. Not just bad, but terrible. It is hard to believe this partnership resulted in this mess, but Wayward Manor is a wreck, top to bottom. You start off as a restless spirit trapped in a treasure chest. How does a ghost get trapped in a treasure chest? Maybe it’s a magical ghost holding chest or maybe it’s on loan from the Ghostbusters or maybe you were not trapped and were just a particularly lazy ghost, who knows. Regardless of how you got stuck in there, you spend your existence trapped in it until a young girl from the family living there opens it ever so slightly, giving you the chance you need to escape. Now that you have escaped, you can move around from object to object manipulating them in such a way as to scare away the various members of the current family living there until just you and the house remain. This works out great because the house (played by Neil Gaiman) also happens to hate the annoying group of dorks currently living there and messing up its very nice interior. Overall, it is a simple, boring story without any charm to it, making it genuinely surprising that Gaiman was the author behind it. Once you get to the gameplay though, it becomes pretty obvious that Gaiman isn’t the only person who mailed it in. The game is divided up into a series of 27 different levels, each with one of a handful of the different inhabitants to scare. Each level is essentially one room that starts off with two or three different objects you can possess by clicking on them. Possessing them causes them to wiggle or fall or something, which will usually cause the human characters in the area to react in some way. You want to interact with things in the right order or at the right time to scare the person in the room. For example, you can make a tiger head roar when an old man is in the right area, and he will shoot an arrow towards it, knocking over the candle and causing the room to go dark. Once you trigger enough scares, other objects in the room will become interactable, allowing for new and different scares. Each room gives you multiple ways to scare its inhabitants (although they tend to top off around ten or so), and once you find six you can trigger the big scare. Things in the room will swirl around, the person flees the room, and you are forced to play another level. Truly terrifying stuff. It seems like an interesting idea at first, sort of like a miniature twist on the point-and-click adventure game genre but it quickly becomes obvious they don’t really have enough ideas to build a full game out of its single trick. The first level has you moving around small rooms in an attic, tricking a burglar into running into plates in what feels like a solid enough introductory level. Then you get to the next area and things are essentially the same and you realize the game developers didn’t have enough ideas to fill out ten solid minutes. The game never progresses beyond its simple premise, and most of the scares are so obvious you will be able to figure things out right away. The whole game is nothing but these simple little tasks that I hesitate to even call puzzles because of how straightforward they all are. With so few things to click on, most of these levels just sort of solve themselves without you even thinking about it. Additionally, despite how short the game is, it repeats itself endlessly. Get the wife’s dress dirty, give a little girl her stuffed toy, make the father dance around, rinse, repeat, try not to doze off. Every level featuring a character has almost identical scares for you to solve and some levels even have you doing the same thing multiple times. The furniture might move around some but its always the same basic idea, and once you figure out something one time it is basically guaranteed you will do the same thing a dozen more times before the game is over. I figure out I could drop a bottle on their heads like ten minutes in, it wasn’t necessary to make me do it twenty more times. There is just no cleverness to any of the gameplay, and while the idea behind this is solid it quickly becomes clear The Odd Gentlemen couldn’t think of a good way to implement it in the actual game. Beyond that, the game just looks very shoddily made. The visuals are just bad, and looks like they belong in a shovelware title for the PS2. Weird little visual miscues are found throughout the entire game, with poorly timed animations or mistakes so bad they might as well be glitches. Candles light way too early compared with the animation, or a glass will be knocked over and still appear standing up. The game is also tremendously glitchy, and I lost track of how many times I had to restart a level because the game got stuck. Similarly, the musical score is entirely forgettable and even Gaiman’s narration feels bored and uninterested. I am still confused how the combination of The Odd Gentlemen and Neil Gaiman, two things that I enjoyed on their own, would up generating this gurgling monstrosity that is basically begging for you to kill it. It would be like if Steven Spielberg and Leonardo DiCaprio teamed up to do a movie and then it turned out to be three hours of them going around and kicking baby seals. It just doesn’t add up. Great plus good shouldn’t equal smelly dumpster fire, but I’ve checked my math here several times and I’m absolutely positive that’s the case. The story is bad. The gameplay is somehow worse. And that’s during the half the time where everything works and the game hasn’t gotten itself stuck in a corner again. Everything is just bad, with nothing positive to say about the game at all from top to bottom. There is no fun to be had here, no entertainment to be gleaned no matter how hard you try and scrape some out. I can not recommend avoiding this experience enough, as “wayward” doesn’t even begin to describe it.